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Showing 7953–7968 of 9492 results
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The Pineapples of Wrath
$22.95Set in the heart of Trois-Rivières’ world-famous (and perfectly fictitious) Hawaiian district, The Pineapples of Wrath follows amateur detective Marie-Plum as she investigates the suspicious death of her next-door neighbour. While the local police believe the former limbo champion was the victim of a fatal piña colada overdose, Marie-Plum is convinced there’s more to the case than meets the eye. A funny, loving tribute to tiki kitsch and old Agatha Christie novels.
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The Pious Robber
$18.95The Pious Robber
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The Pit
$18.95Set in a small-town, sub-Arctic dive bar, this debut poetry collection explores the complexities of addiction and the person beneath, and the possibility of finding home and community in unexpected places. Among Borin’s poems are portraits of the bar’s regular customers and employees—recurring characters, like those who might appear in a dark and unconventional sitcom. The religious night janitor catalogues the day’s sins; the retired barmaid gussies up at the mirror; the regular customers and their regular habits are described to a new employee: “R has a two-drink limit. A likes a coaster. Remember, / Mrs. O takes a chilled pilsner glass / with her bottle of Blue.”In the melancholy atmosphere of the bar and the rooms upstairs, the speakers of Borin’s poems find unexpected solace and belonging. The habits, the routine, the regulars, the predictability of it all brings some kind of chaotic order to chaotic life: We drink without even having to think about it, because it feels good to lose control, feels like regaining it.
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The Places Where Names Vanish
$10.95The Places Where Names Vanish explores the frightening, encoded, and potentially explosive realities of Quebec and Montreal as seen by Ecuadorean expatriates. Marta longs for escape from her impoverished village, where she is pulled between traditionalism, spiritualism, Catholicism, and a dirty, brutal reality. The Places Where Names Vanish is a wonderfully evocative, subtle and heartfelt novel, which concentrates on one brave human spirit, but raises more questions than any sociological expose.
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The Plague
$19.95A modern retelling of the Camus classic that posits its story of infectious disease and quarantine in our contemporary age of social justice and rising inequity.
At first it’s the dead rats; they start dying in cataclysmic numbers, followed by other city creatures. Then people begin experiencing flu-like symptoms as well as swellings in their lymph nodes. The masses react in disbelief when the official diagnosis comes in and later, when a quarantine is imposed on the increasingly terrified city.
Inspired by Albert Camus’ classic 1947 novel, Kevin Chong’s The Plague follows Dr Bernard Rieux’s attempts to fight the treatment-resistant disease and find meaning in suffering. His efforts are aided by Megan Tso, an American writer who is trapped in the city while on a book tour, and Raymond Siddhu, a city hall reporter at a daily newspaper on its last legs from the latest round of job cuts.
Told with dark humour and an eye trained on the frailties of human behaviour, Chong’s novel explores themes in keeping with Camus’ original vision–heroism in the face of futility, the psychological strain of quarantine–but fraught with the political and cultural anxieties of our present day.
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The Plains of Abraham
$24.95The fate of North America was sealed on the Plains of Abraham in a battle that has gone down in history. France and England, historical enemies, faced off in September 1759 in the Capital of New France, Quebec. France then controlled large swaths of North America in three colonies with a total population of 80,000 people of European and mixed origin, while England’s influence was limited to the much more populous Thirteen Colonies along the Atlantic seaboard.
The story of that famous battle began much earlier. Tensions rose in early 18th-Century Europe. France lost Acadia to the British in 1713, who deported the Acadians in 1755. They then laid siege to Louisbourg, entry way to the Capital of New France. The lead up also included conflict in 1753 in Ohio between the English/American troops led by George Washington and “Canadien” and French troops, and the Jumonville Afffair in 1754.
New France was of tremendous strategic interest for France. Its military force included a standing army, a militia comprising troops raised among the “Canadiens” and many allied Indigenous nations, which explains why the Seven Years’ War is known in the United States as the “French and Indian War.” The English had naval superiority and could count on more numerous troops raised in North America.
This beautifully illustrated album casts new light on the events preceding the battles in 1759 and 1760, and their legacy following the Treaty of Paris of 1763.
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The Plate
$39.95The Queen’s Plate was inaugurated, with royal blessing, on Wednesday, June 27, 1860, at the Carleton track in Toronto, located in bucolic surroundings near what is now the traffic-strangled southwestern corner of Keele and Dundas streets.
There is no reason to believe that Queen Victoria was a wild-eyed devotee of horse racing. However, Her Majesty granted the petition of the little turf club in the boisterous Upper Canada community (the population of Toronto was 44,425) and offered as an annual prize, “a plate to the value of Fifty Guineas.” And thus Canadian horse racing was established as “the sport of royalty.”
Today, the Queen’s Plate is the first jewel in Canada’s Triple Crown of Thoroughbred Racing and the longest continuously run stakes race in North America. It takes place every June, and the first-place purse is $1 million. The Plate is unquestionably Canada’s most famous, one-day social and sporting event.
This book explores the colourful history of the Queen’s Plate through words and archival photographs.
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The Players
$22.95Nominated, 2010 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award and Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction
Two French explorers arrive in Court to charm two ships from the English King. The rest, as they say, is history…` Or perhaps not. Set in the libertine era of Restoration England, The Players embarks on a voyage of discovery with compelling characters, a magical plot, and stunning imagery.
A tale of beginnings and of invention, this remarkable novel takes on the 17th century with a contemporary sensibility. Here, the ability to perform — in Court, on stage, in private quarters, and in the brutal cold of James Bay — might save your life… and Lilly Cole must play along with the best of them.
Sly, provocative, and ingeniously funny, Sweatman’s prose explores the deep well of human motivation, how instinct trumps reason when survival is in question.
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The Pleasure of the Crown
$34.95Anthropologists have traditionally studied Europe’s “others” and the marginalized and excluded within Europe’s and North America’s boundaries. This book turns the anthropologist’s spyglass in the opposite direction: on the law, the institution that quintessentially embodies and reproduces Western power.
The Pleasure of the Crown offers a comprehensive look at how Canadian, particularly British Columbian, society “reveals itself” through its courtroom performances in Aboriginal title litigation. Rather than asking what cultural beliefs and practices First Nations draw on to support their appeals for legal recognition of Aboriginal title, Culhane asks what assumptions, beliefs, and cultural values the Crown relies on to assert and defend their claims to hold legitimate sovereignty and jurisdiction over lands and resources in B.C. What empirical evidence does the Crown present to bolster its arguments? What can thus be learned by anthropologists and the public at large about the historical and contemporary culture of the powerful?
Focusing in particular on the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en case, the book traces the trial of Delgamuukw. v. Regina from its first hearing during 1987 and 1991 to its successful appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, which issued a landmark ruling on the case on December 11, 1997.
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The Plotline Bomber of Innisfree
$20.00Set in the near future in the mountainous and fielded cusp between BC and Alberta, The Plotline Bomber of Innisfree by Josh Massey is the story of Jeffery Inkster, an ex-hipster-turned elk farmer. Inkster, whose goal is to live peacefully with his elk, harvesting their antlers, becomes embroiled in the political violence of oil-pipeline expansion.
Drawing from his experience working in the “Peace Country” of northern BC, Massey brings us the story of a community of artists and eccentrics who all become suspects in a series of pipeline bombings. But, amid the activism and counter-terrorism, there are other, more mysterious forces at play, forces that eat into the consciousness of all those involved.
Terrifying, hilarious, and suspenseful, this novel offers a satirical perspective of industrial society that will at once unsettle readers and present them with a cathartic release from the exasperation they might feel living in a civilization teetering towards environmental collapse.
Fans of metafiction, especially those who enjoy works with a thriller edge, and admirers of the works of writers Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges and filmmakers Christopher Nolan, David Cronenberg, and David Lynch, will appreciate this post-modern take on contemporary industrial and environmental politics through storytelling.
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The Pochsy Plays
$18.95Beckett meets Betty Boop in this trilogy of monologues by Canadian cult heroine Pochsy, a nasty, vapid, utterly charming vixen. In Pochsy’s Lips, she’s in the hospital, convinced she’s sick because she’s got a squid where her heart should be. In Oh Baby, she’s at the Last Resort, on holiday from her job packing mercury. And in Citizen Pochsy, our little minx is in the waiting room at an audit from hell. In The Pochsy Plays, Hines remodels and melds traditions like stand-up, absurdism, clowning and neo-cabaret to create some of the most original and cutting satire to hit the stage – and, now, the page. Walk a mile in her distressed calfskin boots as the dark and ditzy Pochsy garbles ad slogans, self-help mantras and desperate grabs at meaning into a postmodern pastiche that is hilarious and harrowing, sweet and bitter at the same time. With extensive photos and musical scores, and an introduction by Darren O’Donnell.
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The Poetic Edda
$23.95Gods, giants, violence, the undead, theft, trolls, dwarves, aphorisms, unrequited love, Valkyries, heroes, kidnapping, dragons, the creation of the cosmos and a giant wolf are just some of the elements dwelling within these Norse poetic tales. Committed to velum anonymously in Iceland around 1270, they were flash frozen from much-older oral versions that had been circulating throughout Northern Europe for centuries. The Poetic Edda is an epoch-making cache of mythological and heroic tales that have compelled Wagner, Tolkien, Borges and Auden, among many others. It is one of the few extent sources that provide a periscope into the Viking Age consciousness.
In this rousing line-by-line translation, award-winning poet Jeramy Dodds transmits the Old Icelandic text into English, placing it in the hands of poetry fans and academics alike, without chipping the patina of the original.
‘Jeremy Dodds’s instinctive irony and musicality is a particularly apt fit for the idiosyncratic syntax and symbolism of Old Norse.’
– ARC Poetry Magazine
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The Point!
$24.95Missing everything but the point: visual poetry celebrating excitement!
The exclamation point is much maligned. It’s bad style. It’s like laughing at your own joke. It screams, it yells, it’s hysterical, it’s maybe even embarrassingly obsequious.
Nasser Hussain disagrees! What’s so bad about expressing enthusiasm? What if you really need to scream? The prescriptions of ‘style’ can feel like an artificial limit placed on our language, insisting we produce a bland monotone that trades on its appearance as rational, subdued, civilized discourse. Against this, The Point!, where poetry bangs its head against this veneer of rationality. Poetry, it insists, is exciting! Is, maybe, excitement itself!
The Point! is composed using only exclamation marks, seeking to reclaim the dignity of the bang’s and explore its expressive possibilities. Against the well-known derision of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Elmore Leonard, and Gertrude Stein, Hussain uses the exclamation point to make a point: let’s celebrate the possibility of enthusiasm!
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The Polar World
$4.95The Polar World combines fantasy and reality: giant squids, hybrids, and humanoid figures dance across Ashoona’s sensual vistas, lending a surreal quality to her work. Springing her imagination but rooted in the landscape of her Kinngait home, The Polar World combines Ashoona’s drawings from her 2017 exhibition with a narrative by Andrew Hunter.
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The Politics of Knives
$17.95Winner of the 2013 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry (Manitoba Book Awards)
If David Lynch crashed into Franz Kafka in a dark alley, the result might look like The Politics of Knives. Moving from shattered surrealism to disembowelled films, these poems land us in a limbo between the intellectual and the visceral, between speaking and screaming. Finding the language of violence and the violence in language, Jonathan Ball becomes the Stephen King of verse.
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The Pollination Field
$21.00Kim Fahner’s The Pollination Field is a poetic foray into the literal and metaphorical world of bees, but it also includes an exploration of other pollinators—bats, beetles, birds, butterflies, dragonflies, and even humans. In these poems, Fahner continues with her poetic observation and documentation of how the human world impacts the environment, but also incorporates myth and feminism in her consideration of how women evolve over time.